1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for storing a large amount of medical image data acquired by various medical image data acquiring apparatuses, such as an X-ray photographing apparatus, an X-ray CT (computed tomography) apparatus and an ultrasound diagnosis apparatus, and communicating medical image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, medical image data, after being acquired by various medical image data acquiring apparatuses, is stored in a data base, and in the case of performing diagnosis medical image data is accessed.
With a conventional system, however, the medical image data is not stored in a data base separately for each of departments, such as the internal medical department, the surgery department and the department of obstetrics or for each of various kinds of medical images, such as the X-ray image, the X-ray CT image and the ultrasound image. As a result, in order to retrieve an X-ray CT image of a patient, for example, all the image data stored in the data base must be retrieved, which is a time-consuming process. In addition, if the data base is accessed simultaneously by a number of departments, this further increases the time required to retrieve the desired image data.
For this reason, a system is desired which efficiently performs the retrieval and communication process of the medical image data stored in the data base.